Announcing the 15 companies competing in Startup Battlefield Europe

TechCrunch scoured all of Europe to find the most innovative and disruptive early-stage startups to launch at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Europe 2018 at VivaTech. And today starting at 9:05 am CET on the TechCrunch homepage you can watch the pitches from the latest 15 Startup Battlefield companies.

Each company will pitch for six minutes on the Pitch B stage at VivaTech, followed by a rigorous six-minute Q&A with esteemed judges from all over Europe. Five companies will be selected to pitch in the finals this evening at 6:15 pm on the VivaTech Main Stage in front of a fresh crop of judges.

Our teams come from a diverse set of industries and are using a range of technologies, from insurance tech to biotech, and from blockchain technology to the latest in bioluminescent capture. Some are first-time founders and others have already negotiated $60 million financing rounds and developed tokens with over a billion-dollar market cap. These founders are challenging industry norms, and replacing the status quo of today’s businesses with technologies that support circular economy, optimized IoT design, GDPR-compliant data innovation and so much more.

Many of the problems these startups attempt to solve are rooted in personal experiences: One entrepreneur is building an insole to help Parkinson’s patients, like her father, regain their ability to sense the ground beneath them. Another entrepreneur grew up in a port city watching the dysfunction of shipments and became fixated on making them more seamless. And there’s an entrepreneur participating who built a flight marketplace, realizing first-hand that hobby pilots’ empty seats were a market opportunity waiting to be unlocked.

Here are the 15 Startup Battlefield Europe companies and the order in which they will pitch:

Over the last two months, these 15 startups refined their business models, demos and messaging with TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield team and editors. Today, it will culminate onstage as they share their business with the world and answer the judges’ questions about the viability of their businesses.

Battlefield alumni have raised more than $8.2 million with over 105 successful exits, so investors, get your checkbooks ready. One of these 15 startups will receive the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Top European startup award along with €25,000 in equity-free money.

TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino and I will kick off Startup Battlefield Europe at 9:05 am CET. You can find more information about Startup Battlefield Europe here.